Hi everyone. I need help to find a new tiling window manager after using i3wm for the last 6 months or so.

I have one serious disagreement with how i3wm functions:
I cannot hide the tab titlebars in tab mode or stack mode, which are apparently the two modes that I'm actually using in everyday normal tasks because I merely need to cycle between the windows, the information in the taskbar is completely useless to me thanks to my top panel that takes this and several other responsibilities handling the focused window.

The titlebars sometimes drive me nuts. They also use the same color as the window border as their background color, so because my theme is mostly white, I have to use solid black borders, but then the title bar is completely out of sync with the rest of the bright theme.

I'd prefer a lightweight, fast, highly configurable window manager that doesn't require any dependencies related to neither DE.

What I look for in a WM:

1. Max view to cycle windows in tab-like mode, without titlebars.
2. Doesn't interfere with panels' rendering (like xfce-panel or vala-panel)
3. No built-in compositioning (this responsibility is carried by Compton).
4. No-nonsense or any built-in menus, I already handle my menus.
5. Being able to configure it without rebuilding from source.
6. Present at the official Debian Buster or Stretch repositories.
7. For X11. I don't intend to transition to Wayland yet.
8. Doesn't have any Python dependencies, I'm trying to get rid of all Python-depended packages over time, and I have a strong preference for Lua or Bash instead.

I already looked into AwesomeWM, i3-gaps, Xfwm, Qtile, Xmonad, FVWM, DWM, *Box, and Notion WM, and I'm still considering Notion and Awesome due to Lua.

Maybe take a look at cwm(?).

Cwm isn't tiling, but dwm is. Dwm is a single, standalone executable that you configure by modifying the config.h file to your liking then compile. I believe the entire project is under 2k lines of code. It isn't perfect but it works well. The only issue I have had is there is not a built-in "status bar" like other window managers where you can have a date, time, etc, but you can pipe data to an area at the top to do this. There are also plenty of small apps that will gather this data for you and send to the "status bar" area at the top.

Here is a link: https://dwm.suckless.org/

i'm pretty sure titlebars can be hidden in i3.
have you read its glorious documentation?

I would have said there might be a workaround for i3 but it's not fully satisfying.

For the record :
https://faq.i3wm.org/question/2885/d...pletely.1.html

I haven't used it, but bspwm seems to be popular.

Not only I read the documentation many times, but I also sent a desperate feature request issue, just like the 4 others before me did, and it was closed straight after 5 minutes as "already been discussed and refused in the past". It's terrible.

I already use it, it doesn't hide the titlebars in tabbed or stacked mode intentionally. You can read the full story in my feature request to i3wm's maintainer in the link above.

I have looked into dwm yesterday, and my main issue with it is that it requires intensive patching and rebuilding in order to configure it and achieve the desired WM behavior and functionality that I get out-of-the-box with ones like i3wm.

I'll try this one soon, I hope it doesn't interfere with panels by treating them as ordinary windows as almost every other WM does.

so you're searching for the perfect personal setup.
that's understandable, desirable even. but why share this with other people in so many places, esp. in that slightly complaining tone?

anyhow, your own statement here:
suggests that i3 is not the perfect fit for your situation.

PS: have you tried setting the font size to 0?

PPS: have you checked out one of the i3 forks?

hopefully happy customising to you.

I can't control the way you imagine my tone, but I can deliver a clear message using pragmatic language to describe my situation straightforwardly. There's not much I can do about the way you choose to read it.

Why share this with other people?
Because I look for a solution for almost a week since I came up with this Topmenu idea which is great. i3wm is perfect except for those titlebars. They're completely useless because they show duplicate information on the screen if you use panels that take a similar responsibility.

The reason they insist to enforce those titlebars at tabbed and stacked modes is unreasonable to me because it doesn't take into consideration that someone might be using a panel or a bar that shows this information elsewhere.

AFAIK according to other users, it should leave a 5 pixel empty border up there, and with my DPI it looks like 10 pixels.

Like i3-gaps and the former wmii? I don't know any others. Are any other forks available at the official Debian repositories?

and there you have the essence of your disagreement with i3 developers.

"AFAIK according to other users"? wouldn't it be better to actually read the docs and see for yourself what can be customised and what not?

ah, so now it also has to be in the debian stable repos. i think it's time for this song again.
anyhow, i3-gaps is not in debian stable repos anyhow.
and yes, maybe one or two more forks exist.

Not necessarily, it's on of the few WM's that I know of which fully respect the the way panels like vala-panel and xfce4-panel should be rendered around the desktop without treating them as regular windows.

OK.

I tested it right now, and it indeed does leave a 5-10px empty titlebar above each tabbed window.

For the protocol, I have read the entire i3wm documentation several times, I already told you that.

I'm not familiar with this song or with its context.

I'm sorry to have disappointed you with this, but I stated this in my original post that I wish the alternative to be included either in the official Testing or Stable repositories of Debian.

I adopted this policy around a month ago and following that I removed everything that I installed manually, or from 3rd party repositories, or binaries that I built directly from git sources.

If you didn't need to use a panel, then I'd have suggested ratpoison.

Unfortunately, I need that panel because of Appmenu. I started to use it only a few days ago, and now because of that, I want to get rid of the titlebars in i3wm. If there was another way to export all GUI menus to a centralized global menu over the top, then I'd consider other options, but at the moment Appmenu is the only functional global menu for GTK2/3 & Qt4/5. I came up with this idea around last weekend and since then I'm quite discontent with my window manager for being unable to remove the titlebars in tabbed/stacked modes.